My experience with compatibility checkers hasn’t been stellar. I’ll check this out.

This feels like a reference to a streamer video I’ve never seen

Bringing extra meshtastic nodes to a protest could be really helpful. Extra nodes would allow information to more easily find a clear path out of a hot zone to routers in safer locations, and it’d do so without using any telecom infrastructure. The encryption’s pretty good too.

Input sanitization typically handles this as a string that only allows characters supported by the data type specified by the table field in question. A permissive strategy might scrub the string of unexpected characters. A strict one might throw an error. The point, however, is to prevent the evaluation of inputs as anything other than their intended type, whether or not reserved characters are present.

I understand the terror of watching this unfold from the outside, if only because many people I love on the inside are facing these new horrors directly. Some wouldn’t even call it new, just a more explicit and sweeping abandonment of our crumbling democratic sociopolitical facade.

Things don’t work that way.

But they do. When it comes to collective action, especially when so many are effectively kept in the dark, revolutions progress slowly then all at once. For example the French Revolution didn’t attain critical mass with the general populace until the treasury was literally empty and the government couldn’t pay its bills. Even then it took many bloody years to stabilize into its modern liberal democratic form.

By comparison, the intent of this new regime, while obvious to anyone paying attention, has only been truly manifest for a few breathless weeks. Though it takes time for the light to break through all the disinformation bubbles and dawn on the general populace, it is finally happening.

I too want it to happen more quickly, and feel every bit of urgency you do, but the truth is it takes people like you and me working together to mobilize others, because this is just one expression of a global crisis, with global roots, that can only be solved with global collective action. Blaming the oppressed and deceived people of democracies that fall is understandable, since everyone thinks “that couldn’t happen here” while it certainly can and has been for years. It’s self-defeating, however, because we can only win this fight together.

I hear you, and I agree there’s a lot more that needs to be done. I can say with some confidence that the average American doesn’t want any of this in the slightest, even if the average American isn’t as politically engaged as they need to be to truly understand the global implications.

The truth is that the average American is mostly thinking about immediate problems in their own life, like how to pay both their rent and their phone bill and still afford gas to get to the grocery store where many staples are increasingly expensive.

Even something as important as voting or protesting can feel like a privilege for the well-off when it’s the choice between that and working a shift to pay bills, and of course voting has been made deliberately difficult in most states. Voter registration isn’t automatic, for example. Likewise Election Day isn’t a National Holiday, so many people have to take off work if they don’t plan ahead to register, apply to vote absentee and meet deadlines for ballot mail-in.

Basically I’m just trying to encourage you to remember your neighbors are normal people who actually do value being good neighbors. They are oppressed and deceived, however, and a small portion of them are straight up brainwashed by a cult.

I hope, trust, and believe that when the chips fall, people in this country will answer the call to fight the global oppressors for themselves and others, because deep down they know that we’re all in this together. First they must lift their heads and see, a difficult process which I think has finally begun.

And really, can one ever have too many rodents opining posthumously?

We’re definitely protesting. It may not make international news, but every day there are angry crowds outside government buildings or in the streets of our cities. The last I went to was this past Monday in NY and there were at least a few thousand of us. Personally I think we need more serious measures but protesting is a start.

Yes, I only used mqtt because it’s a common low-level protocol in smart appliances that’s comparatively simple. A more accessible example might have been Smart TVs being half the price of dumb ones (if you can even find them now) since the principle is the same.

I agree that support is one of the main things cloud legitimately makes easier. Support personnel have more reliable case data, more robust central control, and so forth.

And I think you’ll agree many smart home folks already have/had hubs and bridges (servers) floating around that obfuscate most of that complexity without the need for always-on WAN access. Remote maintenance (patches, firmware updates, etc) don’t necessarily preclude a plug and play experience.

Whether this accounts for the cost and complexity differential consumers experience can be debated, but my point was simpler. Cloud-based products are artificially subsidized in at least two ways. The first is that they’re a loss leader facilitating platform lock-in, but the second is that rich usage data from intimate user contexts is quite valuable to the endless parade of marketing voyeurs.

I get what you’re saying, but I’m not talking about SaaS products. I’m talking about physical things on local networks that don’t need cloud access.

For example, a common wall switch may use mqtt internally, but inexplicably railroad all commands through the online Tuya platform. The device requires a beefier ESP chip as a result. It must be capable of ethernet and async workflows for client platform auth, token refresh, and so forth. It may even cease functioning when it can’t reach the servers.

By comparison, the strictly intranetwork equivalent has far simpler hardware that can run for months on a watch battery. And yet, the cloud-based product will basically always be cheaper, in spite of being more complex and requiring cloud infrastructure.

So, how come? Yes economies of scale might apply to the hardware manufacturing, but certainly not to the cloud requirement. No economy scales quite like 0.

Would be nice if grid tied inverters weren’t such a regulatory PITA. Micro-deployment solar, and more importantly distributed energy storage, makes so much sense and could solve a lot of grid-related problems.

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Everything related to consumer IoT is more expensive and/or difficult to implement as a local-only service.

But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would cloud access make anything cheaper?

Hmmmmm

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RIP, IP

True, but outside CS the word has come to refer to a certain brand of complex heuristics or ML inference.

I don’t have it on hand, but I remember a study from several years ago that tested a variety of pill and tablet medications for actual shelf life. The big takeaway was that the vast majority of medications degrade extremely slowly unless exposed to moisture, sunlight, or excessive heat, and only a few actually become harmful.

TLDR: it’s safe to take an aspirin from the 1940s, but you might need to take two.

They have (or had) a system for reactivation that involved endorsement from another account. IIRC it was QR code based, so one of my friends would scan my reactivation QR code and a few verification texts later I’d have my account back. The last time I was banned, it was after I hearted one of my friend’s posts about his graduation.

Insofar as everyone likes the wherewithal offered by pronominal and hitherto conjunctive adverbs

Most of my lab mates are Chinese and I joined WeChat because it was what they all used. Everything was fine except my account kept getting banned for no reason. I had assumed it might be because I accidentally turned on a VPN, but ultimately I concluded it was because they didn’t want the intermingling of Chinese and American accounts, which was literally the only reason I was there in the first place.